CHAPTER IV

RECOVERING FROM THE CONSEQUENCES

OF THE PRIVATE LIFE

JOHN KROMKOWSKI

INTRODUCTION

The proposed analysis of person and society suggested by the convenors of this seminar is driven by the claim that various societies have developed exemplars which appropriately portray and constitute the relationship among persons and between persons and society. Of course even the smallest societies in all regions and periods of history are complex realities which include diverse activities. Not the least important of such activities that relate to the issue of person and society are the creation and communication of accounts, ritual representations and stories which in a variety of ways explain or at least provide credible answers to primordial questions of personal and social meaning within the welter of activities that constitute the personal and social mystery of human existence. All societies by and through their ongoing existence transmit accounts, ritual representation and stories which order the flow of personal and social experience. The real and/or mythic founders of a society provide efficacious ways of revolving personal questions and societal issues. "From what and Toward what is this society changing?; Who am I and Who are we?" are universal questions about the origins, purposes and material and form of social reality and persons. The plethora of answers to such questions constitute the issue addressed in this seminar.

Such questions in themselves as well as the multiplicity of answers and the efficacy of various attempts to relate person and society seem to generate creative activity. The formation of meaningful renditions of order within a society constitutes the symbols and forms of existence that maintain personal and social being. Such forms and symbolizations of personal and social existence generally include coherent accounts of relationship among the gods, nature, persons and society. Moreover, the character of the relationship of persons to the gods, nature and society constitute the range of differences that exist among societies and the manifold of variety that both historically and contemporaneously constitute the human condition and the great philosophic conversation about the plethora of forms and symbolization of existence.

Among this plethora of social efficacious symbolizations, certain text in various genres appear to be clustered into canons of socially and personally powerful accounts of exemplary relationships among persons and exemplary forms of society. The marking and analysis of change in such canons constitutes the history of socially efficacious symbolization of existence. For example, within the Mediterranean, European tradition among the ancients, the Homeric tales are challenged by Sopho cles, A eschyles, and Euri pides. These dramatists are challenged by the sophists and philosophers. In the ancient Middle East, Genesis is a substantive reworking of other cosmologies. In this vein, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales and The Shakespearean corpus, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote and Faust could be read as an authoritative set of powerful and persuasive European symbolizations that portray a varied register of relationships and exemplars of person and society.

Has Vol taire's Candide become part of this and, can the contemporary American social practice and personal aspiration for privacy be related to Voltaire's prescription for personal and social well-being found in Candide? European canon? Candide is a particularly interesting and provocative text. Its complete title is Candide or Optimism, translated from the German of Doctor Ralph with the additions which were found in the Doctor's pocket when he died at Minden in the Year of Our Lord, 1759. This slim volume is proposed as an initial common reading for this multicultural seminar on person and society because it is a serious account of person and society that is especially relevant to periods of significant change and dislocation. Candide raises basic questions about social order and reflects the intellectual practice of critique which lies at the core the problematic posed by the convenor of this seminar. The text title (and every text) of course, masks the truth of personal and social realities in many ways. This central irony of all representation of person and society ought not be ignored. The implication of this warning will be developed in this paper and raised repeated as we examine the issue of person and society in various traditions. In this regard the role and practice of intellectual critique and the example of Voltaire and Candide are proposed as archetypes with heuristic significance for understanding the process of changing relations between persons and society.

The connection between person and society rendered in Voltaire's Candide1 argues that in his generation the traditional common ground of person and society has been shattered. The order of experiences traditionally conveyed in customs, families, religion and government have lost meaning. And even the philosophic enterprise has degenerated into mere words. The Panglossian answer that all is well in the best of all possible worlds, is a vision of personal and social reality that at bottom equates order and chaos. Candide is a seminal work because Voltaire's imagination and contemporary life are united in the success of the enlightenment intellectual as an exemplar of personal and social excellence. The enlightenment critique of monarchy, nobility, lineage, military recruitment, slavery, the savaging of the new world by Europe, and even the quest for wealth and happiness culminate in Voltaire's vision of a new garden and a new human mission. The consequences of these modern achievements are the shallow roots derived from or at least suggested by Voltaire's diagnosis, critique and especially the therapy found in the closing chapter of Candide. In this vein, Voltaire's recommendation to cultivate one's garden is a prototypic modern maxim. At bottom its normative thrust is that the evils of boredom, want and vice in community all here to existing need to be transcended. A new settlement and form of existence that Candide and associates hope to create will yield well being.

Voltaire's critique of pre-enlightenment society is fashioned in an altogether comical and humorous collection of loosely connected episodes that comprise Candide. Voltaire's entertaining rhetoric and inviting literature-of-engagement mark the devastating critique of eighteenth century practices and reveal ongoing features of the enlightenment notion of person and society.2 Vo ltaire's dramatic narrative raises basic questions about persons and societies and basic methodical issues that have plagued the intersection of art and philosophic discourse. Philosophy and art have had an ancient argument which has been mutually intensified by the skillful use of literary tropes by philosophers and the insightful representation of probing philosophic questions by artists. In Candide, Voltaire's picaresque novel and satire, though almost formless and seemingly aimless because of the totality of its satire is an especially good example of the conflict between the philosophical and the artistic approach to the problematic of person and society. An interesting expression of the relation between person and society can be found in the final chapter of Candide which implies that a reasonable and decent person ought to reject urban life and afortiori abstain from the cause of human misery found in political society and ecclesial community. For pedagogical purpose I propose reading Candide along with a variety of journalistic accounts of suburban life. In this paper I shall focus on Two contemporary journalistic articles by Betsy Mo rris, titled `Shallow Roots'. These and other contemporary reports on the consequences of rejecting urban life and attendant issues of new settlements in previously rural environments are the texts and contexts which prompt the following reflection on person and society.3 Juxtapositioning Candide to contemporary journalistic accounts--the who, what, when, and how of commonsense and true-to-experience representation found in Morris' description is proposed as a methodological and pedagological experiment designed to illustrate the mutual importance of grounding of philosophic reflection in lived experience of persons and the practices of society and the relevance of bringing the lenses of literary expression and imagination to focus on contemporary experiences of person and society.

Voltaire's tale contains thirty short chapters--fittingly truncated, i.e., more than a third shorter than The Divine Comedy. The chapters are often radically unconnected. Curiously both like and unlike the flow of experiential time and the processes of becoming expected from commonsense personal and social existence. Thus the reader is transported into form of consciousness which is for its celebration of the private and its critique of urbanity, civility and the public arena. This literary expression prefigures and is related to a form of consciousness and its social manifestation in American suburban settlements portrayed in Betsy Morris' report. Exploring this form of consciousness and its bearing on person and society as found in texts and social reality is the primary thrust and pedagogy.

The significance and ongoing interest in Candide and its inclusion in the Modern European canon as well as its standing as the critique of the canon is well established. The explication of Voltaire's therapy requires an authoritative guide to Volta ire. Peter G ay, provides the following textual summary and historical grounding of the opus:

young Candide, innocent and naive, is expelled from a miserable chateau in Westphalia by the baron who owns it, and propelled into a series of grotesque adventures. Candide is imbued with love for Cunegonde, the baron's daughter, and with the famous optimistic metaphysics of D. Pan gloss, the tutor of the house, a cruel caricature of Lei bniz. In the end, Candide wins Cunegonde and loses his optimism; his adventures have taught him to see through the doctrine that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Candide's experiences, which are the matter of the tale, are fantastic and horrible, but Candide is not simply a being tricked into joining armies, flogged mercilessly in the course of what was euphemistically called "military training," maltreated by the Inquisition, robbed by greedy merchants, fleeced by unscrupulous courtesans, maligned by venal scribblers, subjected to the grand, silent indifference of nature and the cruelty and selfishness of men. One lesson in eclecticism, Candide builds his world of experience from his visits to South America and the English coast, Paris and Venice, from talks with kings and prostitutes, savages and philosophers. Voltaire's immediate environment--the world of Christian Europe--is confronted from the critical perspective of the Utopia Eldorado, which lives happily without knowing much either of Christianity or of Europe. To draw the contrast as sharply as possible, Voltaire makes Europe's least prepossessing representatives its most prominent spokesmen: rapacious merchants, boorish Barons, worldly Jesuits with eyes for pretty boys, and fanatical Inquisitors are the instruments of Candide's education. By valuing each of them equally, Candide with his democratic curiosity is the very model of the tolerant cosmopolitan. By making him decent, eager for knowledge but a little slow, Voltaire was not merely trying to spin out his tale: he was slyly conceding that even the purest of men has only a precarious hold on reality.4

Peter Gay goes on to indicate the implications of Voltaire tale. He claims a wholly modern perspective and argues that Candide moves is a wholly disenchanted world. Gay views Candide as a secular morality tale. He writes:

there are no harpies here, so gorgons: the causes that move the story are within nature. Some, like the earthquake, are inexplicable but no more miraculous for that. Others find their explanation in social institutions or in human nature as such. Candide leaves Eldorado, at least partly because it is human to boast at home of travels abroad, and also, quite simply, lovely as it is there, human life is not like that; innocent victims are burned at an auto-da-fe in Lisbon after the earthquake because superstitious men reason stupidly and give their hostile impulses free rein; the Westphalian chateau of Baron Thunderten-tronckh is razed, its residents are violated and disembowelled, because men at war are beasts; M. Vanderdendur tricks Candide out of his gold because men in general, and merchants in particular, trample on all moral scruples in their lust for gain. All this is not because men are damned or God is harsh. Nor can it be changed through prayer, pilgrimages, or appeals to the world beyond nature. Change can come from recognition of limits and concentration on realities--this is the moral of the famous last sentence: Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.5

Gay is not alone in his claim that Candide's is a modern, secular classic. No one would disagree with Gay assessment that such a classic work has a multi-layered texture that is inexhaustible with power to suffer prosaic interpretation. Thus, G ay endorses an invitation to enter the world fashioned by Vol taire which this paper proposes as an opportunity to encounter primordial or archetypal problematics fashioned by an artful, humanist and amusingly entertaining guide and creator: a world class creator of illusion.

The modern practice of illusion and artifice begins with the very title. The long title of the work is an amusing misdirection. The reader will soon discover that Voltaire is not Candide nor is Candide utterly frank; the work is not a translation from German; the work is not written by D. Ralph; the text has no additions nor was it an unpublished manuscript found in a dead man's pocket; etc., etc. Yet, Gay rightly dispels attention of Voltaire's philosophic mosaic creative trickery by noting the historicity and reality.

Gay argues that what Candide undergoes in his travels all too many people were undergoing in Voltaire's time--Voltaire could document most, perhaps all, of Candide's adventures from the journals of his day.

Voltaire's realism is so pointedly topical that the modern reader needs a key to grasp the specificity of his allusion: when Candide is made to run the gauntlet in the Bulgarian army, Voltaire is reproducing, almost down to the last detail, a scene that he himself had witnessed at the court of Frederick of Prussia. When Volt aire makes Frederick appear briefly, as king of the Bulgarians--that is, of the bougres--his sardonic realism reaches the height of impudence: Voltaire is hinting that the great warrior-philosopher-king of the Prussians may not be a lover of women.

Obviously, Voltaire is not writing a realistic story but a morality tale, and he violates verisimilitude when it fits his didactic purposes. Candide's disasters occur at so rapid a speed--characters are hanged, stabbed, disembowelled so casually and healed so quickly--that no blood seems to flow and the reader has time neither to be horrified nor to be deeply sympathetic. This quality of Candide, far from being a flaw, is deliberate: Voltaire draws his characters as stick figures, presents them as marionettes to be manipulated, in order to keep the reader distant and thus alert and rational. Candide is not called a philosophical tale for nothing: the reader is purged, not through pity and terror, but through reason, and hence aroused to rational action. Thus the reality of detail is an essential quality of the fable: only the land of Eldorado, where men live in peace, despise riches, have no jails or priests, and are all deists, is obviously, ironically--alas, inevitably--a fiction.6

G ay stakes out the essential characteristics of Candide's experience and the implications of his observations of painful reality. Gay argues that Candide witnesses

the Lisbon earthquake and the superstitious reactions of the Portuguese; he happens upon the execution of the British admiral Byng, shot by his fellow citizens in a solemn ceremony pour encourager les autres; he visits the Jesuit "kingdom" of Paraguay; he has a sympathetic conversation with a Negro slave from the Dutch sugar plantations who has been brutally mutilated by his owner.7

Gay extends his case and claims that such experiences are the ground for Candide's interpretation of his existence. Gay writes that Candide's thirst for conversation is never slaked.

All this talk (much like the philosophers' talk in the salons) is to some purpose. Voltaire transforms Candide, sprung from the genre of picaresque tales, into a Bildungsroman, the story of an education. Candide comes to reject the metaphysical system called "optimism," not by discovering an opposing metaphysical system, but by allowing life to act upon him. He moves from the greedy, heedless, childish pleasure principle to the acceptance of reality. He is slow to learn, and like the typical metaphysician in the Enlightenment's caricature, he continues to parrot "All is for the best" in the midst of rapine, shipwreck, and slaughter. But eventually experience conquers doctrine: in this sense, Candide is propaganda in behalf of empiricism, a dramatization of Newton's methods.

It is significant that Candide does not simply receive and record impressions, but talks them out. In this sense, Candide is a dialogue, and on several levels. There is Candide's unending debate with Pan gloss, carried on whether Pangloss is present or absent. Each new horror is pitted against the doctrine that all is for the best: "O Pangloss," Candide will exclaim, "if you were only here..." or, after some light has broken through his blinders: "If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?" This central debate is surrounded by subsidiary dialogues. Everyone serves Candide as a foil, as a companion in the painful exploration of experience: Cunegonde; her maid; Martin, the cool-headed Manichean whom he meets on his travels and chooses as a friend because Martin is willing to talk philosophy with him; the disillusioned Venetian patrician Pococurante, whom he seeks out to discover whether wealth and cultivation bring happiness. Even cannibals about to eat him are made to debate international law with him. Voltaire was aware of this aspect of his tale: the twenty-first chapter has what must be one of the most expressive chapter headings of the century--"Candide and Martin Approach the Coast of France and Argue." And, indeed, Candide is a dialogue in still another respect: it was part of Voltaire's own evolution into an aggressive social reformer. In the late 1750s when he wrote Candide, Voltaire still defined action as thoughtful resignation to reality; a few years later, after and partly through Candide, resignation gave way to tireless polemical action--just as the Enlightenment itself was moving toward overt and bellicose radicalism.8

Thus selected experiences and the interpretation of existence proceed toward an agenda of action which is located in the new garden which proposes a fresh beginning of the problematic of person and society. Voltaire's new garden presents a restatement of the sources of unhappiness and evil. His recipe for action includes a program of social transformation based on the avoidance of cities, churches, boredom, urban vices and want. Thus Voltaire offers a remedy to the human predicament and proposes that work and resettlement are effective strategies and therapies for the avoidance of unhappiness and its sources.

The world thus fashioned by Voltaire implies the need for a radical action--Voltaire makes this clear when he completes the story with the founding of a new settlement on twenty acres outside of Constantinople. The human conditions portrayed leads the reader to Voltaire's recipe and prescription.

In the final Chapter of Candide the readers should be convinced that experience "demonstrates" the futility of existing conditions and that there is no possibility of happiness and common good in the depraved structure of hetofore existing personal existence and social order. Voltaire argues that the evils of the human condition are boredom, want, and vice and that each of these can be avoided by a life characterized by and located for rural production. Thus Candide's perception and Voltaire's model for persons and society is to--work on the outskirts of a city, i.e., a life of attunement of the cycles of the orchard and garden, with produce taken to and traded in the city. This formulation of human activity and society is shaped through and by the need for a total negation of Candide's experience. The settlement of four old persons--no children, no travel, no church, no state, no adventure, etc., etc. is amazingly attractive and seemingly necessary course for a reasonable person seeking to avoid an evil world. Its attractiveness is contagious and invites action to imitate art. The power of this Voltairean critique of existing relationships among persons and the evil of existing society and the sympathy and sentiment evoked for Candide as an exemplar for a new mode of happiness, i.e., the decent private life still resonates in the souls of sensitive persons yearning for freedom, fairness, liberty, and opportunity. Voltaire's social therapy includes the utter privatization of relationship between persons. Such privitization would support and thus constitute an exemplary social order--a peaceful, safe, work-filled new world. What Voltaire fashioned first in art 200 years ago now seems to be imitated in the privatization of social reality that Betsy Morris, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal, portrays in a series entitled, Shallow Roots9. The implications of this enterprise are especially interesting because they suggest the limits and the consequence of Voltaire's recipe.

These reports on Gwinnett County, Georgia and other New Suburbs reveal aspects of social reality that are related to the image of reality proposed by Voltaire. They are worth pondering as we analyze and reflect on the experiences of persons and societies that Betsy Morris found in contemporary America.

Betsy Morris finds that Gwinnett County, Georgia is a brave new world driven by the very forces which shaped Voltaire's critique. But the reality of limited space is certain. Gwinnett--this sprawling suburb--has been one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. since 1984. Anchored more by the Gwinnett Place Mall than by Atlanta's downtown which is 10 to 35 miles away, Gwinnett County is a striking example of a new breed of suburb restructuring the American landscape from Phoenix and Denver to St. Louis and Baltimore. However, unlike the expected new world these suburbs are marked by alienation and ambivalence.10

For example, one resident loves her country-English dream house, but at the same time is determined to redesign her back deck around a street sign from her older, less glamorous former neighborhood in Ohio. Her ambivalent discourse is found in her comments that nothing makes sense, names change, streets plans are not coherent and nothing is convenient or close.

These new suburbs are bigger and more insular than their earlier counterparts, with less emphasis on community and more on the self. People drive alone to work, alone at home and then turn on the VCR in their own private garden. Despite the shift away from community and the homesickness, residents are still captivated by the sense of being on the edge of something new and exciting.11

What drove planners to the lovely wooded vistas and smokeless industries with their immaculately landscaped grounds could have been the recollection of primordial American visions of rugged individualism and the pioneering spirit. The immigrants, pioneers, and suburbanites and even Candide all come as individuals to cultivate their new garden, yet humanity inevitably replaces the transition from ancient hunter/gatherer to farmer/cultivator because humans want community.

Ambivalence between past and present is not only part of the new suburbanites but is part of the county itself. Gwinnett County, named for a signer of the Declaration of Independence has been forgotten. Gwinnett is a sea of mall goers who sport T-shirt professing allegiance not to the Atlanta Braves but to the Chicago Cubs, Boston Celtics and San Francisco Giants. Rootless corporate nomads see houses as assets rather than homes and most have beige carpets so that resale is possible. Despite the chance to make a real estate killing, these rural paradise seekers feel short-changed by the pace of change--one day a virgin forest, the next day a waffle house. Without buses, sidewalks or street lights, traffic dictates life. Families find themselves giving up music lessons for children and civic activities because of the traffic.12

Although, other factors including working couples and fragmented families add to the sense of isolation, the county truly lacks the previous underpinnings of poor urban community. There are no neighborhood grocery stores, doctors who know the neighborhoods, or even grandmothers.

While schools and churches are at the scene, a tension remains between the old and the new residents. Older residents rebel against minor development. Newer residents have surprisingly attempted to encourage their extended families to move here. Children, who won't be shattered if the family were to again uproot, wonder which new comers can be trusted.13

Even the pre-development residents fighting off being pushed out, echo the ambivalence and alienation of the lovely garden of Eden:

Mr. Dutton sees things differently. He has been offered $40,000 for his little slice of land, which he paid $125 for. He agrees that that would be a good profit in dollars and cents, but the way he looks at it, it would still leave him short. "I got everything in the world I want here," he says. My dogs, my chickens. A good shop I can go in at night if I want to fool with an old lawn mower."

He marvels sadly at a county he believes has sold its soul. It's getting to the point around here," he says, where you're going to have to hire somebody to cry at your funeral."14

Shallow Roots are not restricted to Georgia. Betsy Morris reports that:

Real estate ads in Fairfax County, Virginia outside of Washington, D.C. imply visions of "fox hounds running through your backyard" with their bucolic promises of "a way of life as old as the tall oak trees." However, the reality of the new world of suburbs is a mini-city with five different skylines, plans to develop more office space than Philadelphia, rush hours worse than Washington and sky-rocketing rents. People moving away from the city to become country gentry find "city" all around. This scenario is the same across the country where it is increasingly difficult to tell the urban from the suburban from the rural.15

Information and service economies as well as cheap truck transport and flexible telecommunications have turned the notion of a dominant county into a city ringed by servient suburbs depending on its care. All roads no longer lead to Rome. In the new landscape where sidewalks literally end, all roads seem to lead to traffic jams.

This shift has created an even increasing balcanization of government. For example, Metropolitan Atlanta and Denver each have about 50 separate governments. Yet, these localities are faced with a voracious demand for public facilities--from trash removal to school. In one fast-growing county outside Atlanta 90 new children arrive a week, making school look like trailer parks. The new residents are upscale migrant workers, corporate gypsies, and entrepreneurs following their jobs to way stations rather than new homes. Often the businesses moving these career-oriented under-focused workers are so intent on bottom line that once traditional encouragement of civic boasterism is becoming a thing of the past for the time being. The sense of community in "Progress Centre, U.S.A." is unraveling. Devoid of serious leadership, governing is also hampered by fragmentation of interests. The driving political party is neither Republican nor Democratic but the homeowners association.16 Growth and traffic now whip up the fairly docile citizenry.

Relations between traditional cities and outer suburbs is also strained over fights over shopping mall tenants deciding between efforts to revitalize downtown and the call of the campus-like corporate parks. Fears of resegregation are rekindled as the poorer and blacker inner cities wonder who will pay for the public libraries, indigent health care. Moreover, older cities feel as if they are providing the museums, zoos, botanical gardens and performing arts for the entire metropolitan area. New suburbanites don't care to kick in money for these services when they are trying to create their own.17

However, the fragmentation, duplication and inefficiency may be setting up these suburbs for their own bust. Recent hot spots are already losing out to newer and hotter spots. Fears linger that greed and exuberance will cause these places to be used up in five years instead of a generation of 30 to 40 years.18

Given this contemporary experience perhaps derived from Voltaire's ideal, it is not surprising that the activities of churches on this new world goes unreported. Perhaps it's time to commission another great literary and to petition a fresh philosophical genius to craft a new and meaningful symbolization of existence from the wreckage reported. Perhaps, the new work could begin with additional chapters about Candide and his children and their children's grandchildren which could challenge the moral imagination and develop a theology of work, a sense of civic participation, and learning linked to action so that a more wholesome relationship between person and society could emerge. Perhaps reflections on suffering and misery are essential to the work. Perhaps the notes of other chroniclers unlike Betsy Morr is could provide the missing experiences that record the making over of old neighborhoods or extent videotapes of the remembered songs of Candide's great grandchildren could be appended to the text. One could imagine such a work beginning:

Frankly, I'm pessimistic, but I still have a great banner inscribed with prophetic words: "Don't Leave Town. Here's Still Hope!" that my friends gave me as I left South Bend.

I've kept this banner in my briefcase so that I could carry it with ease as I traveled from city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood singing a song of liberty and justice for all, that affirms community, citizenship, friendship, sharing and shaping the burdens of changing, enhancing the tradition and legacy of inherited wisdom, building on the foundation of community participation and contributing to the common-shared reservoir of trust that must be passed from generation to generation.

. . . . .

While we wait for the elaboration of such an imaginative work, a few analytical, descriptive and prescriptive accounts of community revival can be suggested.

The work of Jane Jacobs, especially The Death and Life of Great American Cities makes the beginning of the American recovery from the consequences of an excessively private notion of human settlement. Chronicles of this revival abound.19 But the full recovery from the consequences of Voltaire's celebration of the private life requires more than examining the record of community organizations. It's time to reread Candide with a fuller appreciation of its irony and existential contradictions. Such insight and wisdom of experience are found in an imaginary diary of one of Candide's great grandchildren, titled, Lotsa things depend on lotsa things: A Grammar of Discontent in Search of Social and Personal Well-Being, Liberty and Justice and the Best Intersection of the Public, Private and Community Sectors. This work may provide an alternate, albeit provisional approach to the dichotomous worlds of optimists and pessimists which have divided traditions, nations, politics, parties and generations and persons since the publication of Candide two hundred years ago.

The experience of the "post-Candide era" revealed the inadequacy of his vision. Yet, the consequences of social innovations and projects designed to free persons and societies from boredom, vice and want as well as political and ecclesial community derived from that vision need not be utterly abandoned. A fuller and more differentiated theory and/or artistic vision of the vitality of `the private' as a co-equal sphere of human experience to the political and ecclesial spheres of human sociality could be affirmed and ironically traced to the last chapter of Candide and to the preceding images of activities of the political and ecclesial spheres that are bereft of justice and liberty. The development of such a theory of spheres of human action and their relationship to each other and to the experiences of the deepest and highest dimensions of our humanity is an ongoing obligation and responsibility of persons interested in the problematic posed in this seminar. To find the balance points among the public, private and community dimensions of existence is to discover the relationship between the person and the society. The experiences of significant social, economic, religious, intellectual, and cultural change which prompted Voltaire's work are even clearer today. The ongoing task of linking the philosophic gaze on the process of change may be painful, but the silence of contemplating other objects is neither responsible nor possible. Philosophy and art have the mutual mission of providing symbols of existence which shape our consciousness of person and society. In this vein, Candide is an important text which deserves to be extended by way of critique of consequences of excessively privatization and toward a fuller treatment of the personal and social answers to the mystery of human existence.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

NOTES

1. The translation of Candide and edition of criticisms by Robert M. Ad ams, Candide (New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966), includes a previously inaccessible array of literary, social and philosophical criticism and historical background. Especially valued are works by A.O. Lov ejoy and Andre Mo rize. Articles by Georges Asc oli, Rene Pom eau, I.O. Wa de, J.G. Wei ghtman and Robert Ad ams include literary as well as philosophical issues of providence, pessimism and absurdity. Adams has arrayed the Volt aire controversy around the following topics: faith, coherence, humanity, bourgeois or nihilist, style and greatness of Voltaire's work. Some measure of Candide's importance is indicated by the following best of commentators: Paul Va lery, Nova les, He ine, Ta ine, Fla ubert, de Sta el, de Ma estre, Bl ake, and Victor Hu go. The edition also includes the assessments of Anatole Fra nce, William Bo ttiglia and Ludwig W. Ka hn.

2. See Peter G ay's The Enlightenment (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966). The exhaustive scholarship in this work built of his early analysis of Voltaire's political thought is an invaluable background on the intellectual climate and intellectual sleight of hand mastered by Vol taire. Other secondary analysis can be found in the following studies:

Carl L. Bec ker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1964). Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). Lester G. Croc ker, The Age of Enlightenment (New York: Walker and Co., 1969). Paul Ha zard, The European Mind (1080-1715) (London: Hellis & Carter, 1953). Frank E. Man uel, The Age of Reason (New York: Cornell University Press, 1959). R.J. Wh ite, The Anti-Philosophers (Edinburgh: R & R Clark LTD, 1970).

3. The immediate origins of American anti-urban mentalities are ably traced in Thomas Be nder, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore & London: The JHU Press, 1975) and the popularity of Candide is attributed to its regular inclusion in dramatic form in repertory theater and its high cultural niche has been vaunted through Leonard Bern stein's operatic score.

4. Peter Gay, op. cit., pp. 197-200.

5. Ibid

6. Ibid., pp.198-200.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. See Betsy Mo rris, "Young and Old Alike Can Lead Lonely Lives in the New U.S. Suburbs," and "New Suburbs Tackle City Ills While Lacking a Sense of Community," Jeffrey M. El liot, ed. Annual Edition: Urban Society, 4th edition (Guilford, Conn.: The Duskin Publishing Group, 1989). These articles were regularly published in the World Street Journal, March 26 and 27, 1987.

10. Ibid., p. 54.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 55

13. Ibid., p. 56.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

16. Ibid., p. 52.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 53.

19. Jane Jac obs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, l963); See Harry C. B oyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Harry C. Boyte, Community Is Possible: Repairing America's Roots (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); James V. Cunni ngham and Milton Ko tler, Building Neighborhood Organizations (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983); Ed. Marci niak, Reversing Urban Decline (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, 1981); Manuel Cast ells, The City and the Grassroots (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).